Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Prometheus (re)Bound; Scene One

It bugged me that in the original version, Shaw and Holloway were searching for cave paintings of star constellations. Finding undiscovered cave paintings in the year 2089 is already an near impossibility, a once in a lifetime find that alone would have insured these two young scientists life long fame and fortune (of the academic variety). Instead, we are to believe that these two have been circling the globe like the Scooby Gang finding a series of finds on the level of the Chauvet Cave. I can not. Noticing the constellation is sort of discovery would be made by a diligent researcher hunting through an archive, noticing a pattern that had escaped others. So this scene was rewritten, no to deepen the theological horror, but just to make Holloway man-splainy, and Shaw the student of the archive.

Titles: Prometheus (re)Bound

1

00:05:00,000 -- 00:05:07,000

[Flash forward 35000 years to an archaeological dig in the Scotland.]

[Elizabeth Shaw has just broken through into a cave, she calls for Holloway to come and look at her findings, they gaze in wonder at cave paintings etched into the cave]

2

00:05:26,200 -- 00:05:29,200

Shaw: Get Charlie.

3

00:05:38,900 -- 00:05:41,900

Dig Assistant: Doctor Holloway!

4

00:05:43,200 -- 00:05:46,300

Dig Assistant: Charlie!

5

00:05:53,500 -- 00:05:57,300

Halloway: What?!

Shaw: Come quick!

6

00:06:26,500 -- 00:06:31,500

Titles: Isle of Skye - Scotland, 2089

Halloway: Did you date it?

Shaw: 35.000 years, maybe older.

7

00:06:54,800 -- 00:06:58,000

Halloway: I've never seen anything like it.

Shaw: I have...

8

00:07:00,000 -- 00:07:03,100

Halloway: Well, of course, the stacked composition and idealized figure are both common tropes.. We've all seen things like this, but this site is so isolated and so remarkably early. After all, hierarchical scaling are usually the trappings of empire...

9

00:07:03,700 -- 00:07:08,100

Shaw: No I mean I've seen this; this exact same configuration; THAT constellation. I've seen it twice before - thought it was a coincidence. Only this's got to predate the others, by a millennium.

FAQ: Sith

The Sith are the bad guys in Star Wars. Darth Vader and the Emperor are Sith Lords. They are the Yin or “dark side” to the Jedi Yang.

What does the term Sith mean as it is used on this blog?

Beyond their place in the fictional universe of Star Wars, the Sith are a narrative element of a film made by a particular group of people in a particular time and place. Therefore the Sith have a very real social and political context. And it is this very real world idea that I am referring to in this blog:

Lucas and his crew were young Americans working together at the end of the Vietnam War and in the shadow of Watergate. In the parlance of that era’s youth, the Sith are “The Man.” They stand in for the corrupt authorities of the day as seen by the young people of the day. Lucas describes them as “Nixonian gangsters.”

And like Nixon, the Sith perfectly represent a particular strain of American authority: Cold Warriors. Not just the violence and paranoia of America’s anti-communist foreign policy, but their repressive and absolutist domestic policies: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”

Even the world building efforts of the cold warriors were perfectly embodied by Lucas and his crew. The top-down Utopian art, architecture and urbanism of the Cold Warriors were elegantly re-imaged as the Deathstar.

The Sith are characterized by the same traits that identify the Cold Warriors: they want control; they use a fear of chaos to squash any and all dissent. Their solutions are over simplified and deny the importance of disorder and spontaneity.

FAQ: Jedi

Just as the Sith have a real world context (see above FAQ) so do the Jedi. But just because I believe the Sith were inspired Cold Warrior anti-communists and Modernists, I do not mean to say that the Jedi were Post-Modernists and communists.